I was listening to a recent episode of Spark, on CBC, and they were talking about a company called Y Combinator. This is a company, founded in 2005, that invests a small amount of money into many startups. The startups move to Silicon Valley for three months to work on ideas, and refine their pitch to investors. This culminates on Demo Day when the startups make a presentation to a large number of investors.
http://ycombinator.com/
What I found particularly interesting about this segment of Spark was Nora Young's observation of how few of the startups had women founders. She was interviewing Randall Stross because he had just written a book on Y Combinator. His conclusion was very few women are programming in high school, and younger, and this leads to the discrepency in the number of women who are capable of entering the startup field later on.
I had heard about the gender issue in technology on previous episodes of Spark, and I often wonder if I should be encouraging my daughter to explore the possibility of Computer Science as a field of study. If not purely Computer Science, should I be encouraging her to go into something that combines computer technology with another field of study? At the very least, I think everyone should learn some basic programming, and we should get a better understanding of how technology works.
In the past ten years, our lives have drastically changed with regards to use of technology. We now have smartphones that do everything for us, but we have no idea how they work, or even how the Internet works. I think we should inform ourselves, and our children about these technologies. We should not leave it to an upper echelon of people who will be responsible for how we live our lives.
I know my father tried to get me to study business prior to starting university. He might have been being facetious. I was going to be a great scientist, like him, and get my Ph.D. He told me to take business because that was where the money was. I did end up with three degrees, just all Bachelors.
I look back now, and wonder why was I not more interested in computers. Of course, had I been, I could have ended up in the whole dotcom boom, and bust. I don't want to force a life on my children they do not want, yet I want them to find something fulfilling they can to with their lives, and make a living doing it. I am certainly not concerned with getting rich. I think if you have enough money to do the things you enjoy, and not worry about living from paycheque to paycheque, you are doing great.
Having enough money to provide a good life for you, and your family is the goal. If you can also save money to help your kids out with a post secondary education, if they choose one, added bonus. Some more money to take a vacation every once in a while, awesome. If your job causes you to be away from your family, and you cannot spend time with them, it has to be something you love doing.
That's the key. Finding something you are good at, something you enjoy doing, and something you can earn money doing. Not all of us are so lucky to find all three. This is what I want for my kids.
By the way, if you are interested in learning how to program, Codecademy is a website where you can learn to program, for free. Just a matter of how much time you have, and how disciplined you are.
http://www.codecademy.com
I say disciplined because I started learning German with Duolingo a few months back, but I have not visited the website in a few months. When I first started, I would use it daily, but I don't need German right now, and we were busy this summer, so I stopped. I assume learning to code would be similar. You might start of all excited, but I wonder how quickly the excitement would wane if you have nothing motivating you to learn how to code.
http://duolingo.com/
For kids, MIT developed an easy programming language called Scratch. The parts of the program fit together like Lego.
http://scratch.mit.edu/
Posted with Blogsy
No comments:
Post a Comment